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1 month ago | 
mckinsey.com | Sven Smit |Shubham Singhal |Olivia White |Ezra Greenberg
Amid tariff uncertainty and a possible recession, the world needs a new base of balance and trust to create a thriving economy. Business has a vital role to play. A global system of full economic integration—the aspiration of decades of negotiations and the worldwide underpinning of corporate strategy—has never been fully realized. The latest round of global trade talks sputtered to an inconclusive end in the early 2010s.
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Feb 26, 2025 | 
mckinsey.com | Anu Madgavkar |Kweilin Ellingrud |Sven Smit |Chris Bradley
Diverging work experience patterns drive a “work-experience pay gap” that makes up nearly 80 percent of the total gender pay gap, equal to 27 cents on the dollar among US professional workers. Women tend to build less human capital through work experience than men who start in the same occupations, as seen in the tens of thousands of career trajectories we analyze. Over a 30-year career, the gender pay gap averages out to approximately half a million dollars in lost earnings per woman.
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Feb 7, 2025 | 
mckinsey.com | Jeongmin Seong |Olivia White |Michael Birshan |Sven Smit
Trade reconfiguration continues along geopolitical lines, this update with 2024 data shows. Trade relationships are continuing to reconfigure, and changing geopolitics is a major reason. The United States has continued to shift trade away from China and toward other economies such as Mexico and Vietnam. In some cases, this is due to these economies forming an intermediate step in trade flows between China and the United States.
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Jan 27, 2025 | 
mckinsey.com | Jeongmin Seong |Olivia White |Michael Birshan |Sven Smit
Trade reconfiguration continues along geopolitical lines. Trade relationships are continuing to reconfigure, and changing geopolitics is a major reason. The United States has continued to shift trade away from China and toward other economies such as Mexico and Vietnam. In some cases, this is due to these economies forming an intermediate step in trade flows between China and the United States.
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Nov 21, 2024 | 
mckinsey.com | Sven Smit
Global growth is expected to remain stable and slow into next year, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF). Its World Economic Outlook report, released in October, predicts global annual real GDP growth to be 3.2% in both 2024 and 2025, rising to 3.1% in five years’ time, a performance it describes as mediocre compared with the prepandemic average.
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Oct 21, 2024 | 
mckinsey.com | Sven Smit
Positive news is emerging from various sources, suggesting the global economy might be turning a corner, though substantial risks remain. Central banks face a challenging balancing act between managing inflation and promoting growth, which led to divergent actions this month. Several banks cut rates to boost the economy in September, while others tightened policy to tame inflation. Although headline inflation is approaching central banks’ targets, core inflation remains elevated.
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Sep 30, 2024 | 
mckinsey.com | Alexander Sukharevsky |Eric Hazan |Sven Smit |Marc de Jong
At a glance A three-lens approach–on adoption, creation, and energy–is required to assess Europe’s competitiveness in the emerging generative AI (gen AI) economy. While much of the current discourse centers around large language models (LLMs), European policy makers and business leaders must look beyond LLMs. Adopting a holistic approach to capitalize fully on gen AI’s potential could boost European labor productivity by up to 3 percent annually through 2030.
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Sep 20, 2024 | 
mckinsey.com | Sven Smit
US employers added 818,000 fewer jobs (30%) than estimated for the 12 months ended in March, but second quarter growth was up 3.0%. Central banks are moving rates or considering doing so, including the US Federal Reserve. While resilient, global economic growth is uneven, forward-looking indicators now show a divergence between manufacturing and services on a global basis.
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Aug 28, 2024 | 
mckinsey.com | Anu Madgavkar |Olivia White |Sven Smit |Chris Bradley
Labor markets in the world’s eight largest economies have tightened significantly since 2010, although the character and level of constraint varies among them. Here we offer a detailed portrait of each country’s labor market to illustrate the contrasts and similarities between them. We examined changes in aggregate labor supply and labor demand across eight of the largest advanced economies, using data on employment, unemployment, and job openings from 2010 to 2023.
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Aug 23, 2024 | 
mckinsey.com | Sven Smit
Despite current geopolitical tensions, the global economy remains resilient. Economic growth in surveyed economies is accelerating, as growth in both the manufacturing and services sectors picked up in June. Manufacturing growth was largely stable (except in the eurozone, where it contracted faster) while services sectors remained bright, albeit expanding at a slower pace. Growth in the second quarter was varied but remained positive across the globe (Exhibit 1).
